I. Field of Invention
The present invention pertains to the field of telephones. More particularly, this invention relates to a cellular telephone that includes functionality for performing both cellular telephone calls and Internet telephone calls.
II. Art Background
Computer systems including personal computer systems having suitable hardware and software may be employed for placing telephone calls via a network according to existing Internet communication protocols. Such computer systems typically exchange data packets containing voice information via the Internet.
On the sending side of an Internet telephone call, such a computer system usually generates digital data which represents input speech from a user and then assembles the digital data into data packets that are suitable for Internet transfer. Such digital data representing speech may be generated using a digital sampling and data compression technique or more sophisticated speech representation techniques including software vocoding techniques.
On the receiving side of an Internet telephone call, such computer system typically extracts the digital data representing speech from the received data packets and recovers the speech for rendering to a user. Typically, the recovery of the speech involves a decompression function or an inverse of the vocoder function on the sending side that generated the digital data representing speech.
Such prior Internet telephony systems typically require that users on both ends of an Internet telephone call have a computer system such as a personal computer system. In addition, such computer systems must have specialized Internet telephony software for performing compression/decompression or vocoder functions as well as microphone and speaker peripherals. Unfortunately, such computer systems with specialized hardware and software are usually relatively bulky and usually impose relatively high costs to users.